Bash allows users to do very advanced things when defining shell prompt, including colours and propagation of information into xterm title. Unfortunately, when you want to use mc (Midnight Commander) in conjunction with bash prompts, you may find, that not all advanced escape sequences are handled by mc properly. To overcome this issue you can have a special prompt just for mc. To achieve that, consider the following shell snippet:

if ps $PPID |grep mc; then
        PS1="[\u@\h:\w]\$ "
    else
        PS1="${TITLEBAR}\
$BLUE[$RED\$(date +%H%M)$BLUE]\
$BLUE[$LIGHT_RED\u@\h:\w$BLUE]\
$WHITE\$$NO_COLOUR "
    fi

The resulting prompt will look something like this:

[andre@host:/a/b/c/project/subproject]$ |
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4 comments have been posted.

    July 27, 2014, 6:12 a.m. - Pavel  
    I think the better idea is to create (or modify) this file ~/.local/share/mc/bashrc. This file will be used as a sub-shell rc-file.
    Reply
    June 22, 2017, 1:14 a.m. - Vadym  
    thanks for the idea
    Reply
    March 11, 2012, 11:03 p.m. - Juri  
    Thanks for sharing the idea. Helped me to set a simplified (and unbroken) prompt for zsh if started with mc.
    Reply
    July 22, 2011, 12:04 p.m. - Zakaria  
    Good tutorial, simple and easy
    Reply
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